Hooked
by Jack Patrick
Summary: Hook captures the Bell, becomes addicted to the dust.
1. Chapter 1

Sunset, Neverland. The ship at anchor and two on deck drink from jeweled goblets. A fat man and another, gaunt and grim. A shrill, silver hook hangs his side and is touched with a crimson sung out from the west. A red burning yet from the ends of the earth and the Captain calls for his pipe.

"Fetch the pipe, Smee."

His eyes move between Captain and hook. "Captain, ye don't want it again. After last night?"

"Don't be simple, Smee. There is no last night." The Captain speaks flatly and is turned to a sea swelling scarlet. "The pipe, Smee."

A pause. "What say we sets you with a choice of strumpet from shore and-"

"There is only one girl. Bring me the muse."

Smee stands up and is still a moment, is weighing inevitability. He takes up his bottle and approaches the man, wavers a moment before pouring into his Captain's chalice and leaning to speak lowly. "Now you just let old Smee-"

"The fucking pipe!" He flings the goblet to the deck with a wooden clank and the scream tears out to sea. Smee is still. The Captain has drawn a pistol and pulls sterling back into his thumb, hammer tapping a chill into the salted air, barrel shaking and Smee's eyes follow it.

"Aye, the pipe."

The Captain is left to ponder horizons he'll never touch. A green darkness touches the saltwater, clapping softly. There will be no storm, the sky nigh bled out. He is dark-eyed and scarred. A quiet canyon falls from his socket as if to suggest the man once held tears to burn skin away. Mirrored by a twin scar opposite his pocked face, cast up from black tangles of beard. A face what tells of blades escaped.

Smee's hollow step speaks out his approach. He bears a wooden chest, and a lantern bearing likewise a white light darting about its iron limits, flickering fiercely and ringing out. A pixie.

The Captain looks fondly onto the light. "The lady arrives."

Her voice comes in bells. "You left-handed salt-sucker, you let me go and play fair once in your life."

"Feisty as a fish on the hook, love."

The light is quivering. Perhaps she is frightened, though expression does not show through the glow illuminating the deck, the only light left them and under her shine Smee unpacks an oaken, smoke-blasted bowl and pipe. Smee fits twists of pipe-weed into the pipe with blackened, calloused fingers. His cheeks are blackened with grease and rise ruddy from a beard in want of never a trim. He is beginning to gray and always has been.

Hook eyes the fairy, still and silent. "Smee. What of the weed are we left?"

"Not more'n half a cask, afraid. Injuns won't budge, won't deal with us, Captain. They been askin' for the dust."

"The dust does not leave the ship. Does it, dear?"

"Eat seaweed you slobbering sea-urchin. If Pan was here he-"

"He'd what?" roars the Hook, shot up from his chair.

Smee touches his shoulder to stay him. "Now, Captain. You know that little elfin Pansy won't show 'is face anywheres near the camp nevermind find the brass to confront ye, Captain. The Hook?" The words loosen his Captain's expression and seem to sit him down.

"No, sir, he won't. Ever since ye razed their little clubhouse and got hold of her majesty here, he hasn't durned showed his face outside of shadows and rumor. The boys 've scattered. They're lost, Captain."

The Captain nods. "Lost, yes." He turns on his captive. "No, darling, not without his wings he won't. So long as you're mine the child is naught but a salt on the lips." He spits.

She flares up and rings out, "If you'd half the gall as Pan you'll go back to the island and face him alone." Her color is no honest white, but blue and pink and yellow between, a kaleidoscopic mingling to brilliance. "You're only a crooked old cod-swallower afraid of a boy thrice the man of you." As she rings, she burns and flaps and sparks snow from her shape.

He howls something sinister, stares at the bright pool of dust she has shed. "That's it. Sing me your song." He lifts a bottle. "Wake it up for me, love." The bells are stilled and he pulls in silence. All eye the Captain. He lowers the bottle and considers the pixie. "Produce." She is still and softens her light. The Captain growls and lifts the rum, drains it slowly. All eye the pixie. Empty now, he rises and sends the bottle in a dark and whistling arc, splash telling none can see. All eye the pixie. "Take her, Smee."

She stares at the man who takes up her cage. Smee holds it still a moment, perhaps weighing the gravity of the star within, perhaps weighing its beauty and counting it holy and with it regret. She grips the iron bracingly and a wing flickers. Smee holds the cage over the bowl and gives it a slow, heavy thump that rings out as brass on a cymbal, flaring out light and spilling forth sparks that drift slowly to the bowl beneath and burn there, kept alive by their own radiance and pulsing as if some life-form all their own. He is slow in it and repeats.

The Captain nears and tears the cage from him, hook piercing through the bars. He lifts it to his face and the fairy cowers away. Heat touches his brow and he grins for it and then viciously shakes the cage in a fit of light and noise. She is thrown from and into iron, helpless to avoid the hook fit through a notch in the bars. Sparks crash forth and sound also, and so brilliant is the flash it can be seen from shore, a clamor flung crashing through trees like some terrible call to worship or if not then a challenge to all the island, boys and men.

The dust produced, Hook drops the cage with a rattle. The fairy lies face-down and flickering, yet lives. A gash crosses her back and from a hissing hook drips pale-burning blood, sin unreckonable.

Collected in a stone spoon and fed to the tobacco, the dust screams smoke through shank and stem to turn and brew within dungeonous lungs, and Smee descends to the ship as one escaping a storm.

The Captain pulls innocence from a flame while the pixie lay still. A breeze turns in, lifts and drops a wing. Overhead, constellations of sickles and spiders turn at an observable clip and with two pale-green shepherds to steer the great wheel. One full, one curved akin to the hook below. Neither waxing, neither waning.


	2. Chapter 2

.II.

A red disc swells from sealine and paints the island an emerald in blue. An encampment of shanties squats on shore and among them the ritual of daybreak. Smokes from fires are swept seaward, scents telling tobacco and boar-meat. Men sit in a wooden lookout, one picking his teeth with a yellow bone and watching the treeline for activity. Patrols walk the woods and the squawking of gulls encircles the ship. The Captain is sprawled flat on deck, his good hand stretched out above his head, reaching for nothing in sleep. A ruby rings his finger and sunlight catches and bounces infinitely within the red prism.

The day is past prime before the Captain is woken. A dinghy is set out from shore, prow dipping and lifting with the surf and trained on the ship.

"Captain, ye must wake." Smee. "There's reason, Captain, up with ye now." He makes no sign of waking and the rowboat is half its way there. He draws a pistol, raises and fires, halts the rowing and opens the Captain's eyes, though he does not start.

"Captain," Smee says. "A boat its way here. Four in it, and two of 'em boys, looks like." Two men, one pirate, one injun, and boys, shackled and hooded, aboard the boat, stayed by gunfire.

The Captain rises, reads the time in the sky, stomps a foot from sleep and frowns. "Eyeglass, Smee. And water." He digs his hook into the starboard rail and watches the boat. Smee returns with a jug and the Captain drains it. He looks through the glass. "Who is the injun?"

"That'll be Vaya, sir. The one who betrayed the boys and led us to the bell. He's one of us since."

"The traitor delivers again," the Captain says. "Call to them. Abandon arms and approach."

Smee calls out to the boat, and the men there exchange glances.

"Perchance they misheard you. Set the cannon, a final warning." Smee puts flint to spark and a cannonball tears through the air and in a fury of white spray dips the dinghy into its watery crater. The men toss overboard rifle and bow, arrows and spear.

"Come forth," the Captain says. Smee calls out to them, and the boat is rowed forth. They pull their way alongside the ship and tie to its flank.

Smee throws down a rope-ladder. "The boys," he calls. The two boys reach blindly for rungs, hooded, shackles clang the climb through. Once aboard, the pirate lifts himself onto the ladder and the Captain fires a pistol down into the dinghy. It drops the man in surprise and a spring of seawater leaps up from the hull.

"Captain," the man cries.

"Roderick," the Captain calls back. "If you expect aboard this ship, you'll wait for instruction." He turns to Smee. "Show the boys to their room."

Smee drives the two down into dim corridors, rocking weakly to the charge of the waves and rhythmic too the shackles that clink in step. They come to a torch-lit cell, bare and filthy, and Smee lifts the first boy's chains over a hook protruding from the back wall, hanging him from it. He moves to the second, lifts, but the boy kicks into his gut drops head-first in a thud to the floor, curls.

"No use actin' like that," Smee says, and hoists him back up, hangs him to the wall next his companion.

On deck, the Captain has bound the Injun to mainsail. The white man waits in the boat, and the Captain returns to look down on him.

He is bailing the boat with his hat and pauses to look up. "Is this any reward for us, Captain? Us who's only done your biddin'?"

"Where did you find them?"

The man blinks. "They was sneakin' 'round in the brambles, just outside the camp. Spyin' in, the peepin' pricks."

"And it was only the two?"

"Honest, Captain. Just the pair of 'em."

The Captain looks to the shore, the camp, the tower jutting up in authority, lookout. "You've done well," he says, and pulls up the ladder.

"Captain," the man cries.

"You'll have your reward once I'm through with the boys. Return ashore until then."

"But, Captain."

"Start at your rowing, Roderick. That leak is no trifle, I think." He turns away and past the injun, into the ship and after the boys. A bird, a sparrow perched in the crow's nest watches the Captain disappear and then, as if on cue, shoots off shoreward, flapping and falling and bounding back.

The Captain enters the room and regards the prisoners. Their feet dangle just over the floor and one of them coughs. "Off with their blinds, Smee."

Smee does so, and they both meet Hook's gaze, are each raggedly clad in animal skins. One red, one grey, fox and rabbit pelts. The grey boy is bloodied from the scramble with Smee, and brown bangs fall to his forehead and mat there in the red smear of it.

The Captain takes a pipe from his jacket and sets it to teeth, this while staring a cold quiet onto the boys. "Well. A hare and a fox. Don't suppose either of you have a light?"

The Captain laughs alone. Smee strikes a match and sets it to pipe. A flame trembles in the chamber and the boys look on. The Captain points his hook at the fox. "Hoist him down, Smee."

Smee sets him on his feet, the boy standing up to his breast.

The Captain smiles. "What is your name, boy?"

Silence again.

"Chairs, Smee. For the guest and for me." Smee sets down chair and stool, wooden and crude. The Captain sits down and the boy takes the stool. "Now. Your name, boy."

"It's Michael."

"That's a lad. Michael. Well, Michael, as this is my ship, and as you are my guest, you'll forgive me my frankness." Coils of pipesmoke unfurl upward and turn there in space between the two. "You'll find yourself, Michael, in a precarious position. A spy, ensnared."

The boy shakes his head. "We were only hunting."

"And yet the fox is mine." The Captain grins again. "Prisoner of war, I will strike you a deal. You answer me, honest as able, and you live this day through. And the next, and the next, forever and ever and happily after."

The boy glances back to his companion, slung yet from the wall.

"Don't bring him into this, boy. Not yet. You look at me." The boy turns back to the Captain, smile vanished, pipe put down. "Where is he?"

Nothing. The Captain sighs and rises, walks to a shelf and from it selecting a pair of pliers, their gleam cast leprous with rust. He speaks while examining the tool in the torchlight. "It seems, boy, you have forgotten yourself. You are my guest and will act accordingly. You'll speak when spoken to." He turns black eyes onto the boy. "Where is he hiding?"

Again, nothing.

"There are times," he is pressed, "to bite one's tongue." The Captain leans over the hostage, fits a hook into the boy's mouth and by its point brings his jaw down slowly. "This is not one." He thrusts pliers into the boy's mouth, scraping their way to an eyetooth, clamps down and draws. In a single motion, tooth and blood come spilling from the boy and he drops to the ground in wormlike writhing. The tooth falls with a tap next to the child's head. "Your dagger back."

The Captain waits. The boy spits. A black boot is put to his head, pinning it down, and the villain leans in, takes another. A cry is let out this second time and the boy sobs into a dark puddle of blood. Another tap.

"Find your tongue yet?"

Only a moaning.

"Shall I find it for you?" He says this while admiring his own curve of claw and the sobs come harder. The other child is shivering against the wall and tells only the dull jangle of chain against wood. Boys had been captured before and upon release told stories of hunger. The pirates would catch a boy and trade him back for one of their own. That was how it went, the worst he expected.

The one called Michael fights back the spasms and faces the Captain because he was once promised that courage counts for something. He wipes water from eye and blood from lip and the Captain grins.

"The cur will bare what teeth he is left. The dust, Smee."

Smee makes no move. The Captain regards him coldly and he leaves the room.

Michael rises and takes back his seat. The Captain relights his pipe and watches back. A single crash rings out from some adjacent chamber and a soft clap of light affects the room, in under the door. Perhaps the boy understands. "Show me your fangs, and I'll show you mine." Smee returns with a bowl spilling pale light from its brim.

The Captain says, "A gift from an old friend." While he speaks, he revisits the shelf. "No doubt you remember the bell? We've become quite close, really. She's wonderful company, I'm sure you know. Not all are stubborn as you, boy."

He selects a dark vial and pours it into the bowl, bubbling furiously, rejecting the powder before calming itself to a muttering simmer. A dark violet glow from the bowl, it illuminates the villain's face while the boys watch. "No, lad. I'm afraid the firefly's been more than accommodating. Hasn't she, Smee?"

Smee is silent.

"That will be enough of your sulking, Smee. You are released. Go entertain the injun."

Smee swallows something back and quits the room.

"Yes, boy, the bell has come around," the Captain continues, " and I think we'll find the same with you, soon enough."

He dips his hook into the venom and lifts it dripping over the child, seized by the neck and drops it hissing betwixt clavicle and throat. The boy gasps and eyes go wild. The Captain digs deeper and with a snarl releases him, to the floor, left there to slobber and wretch and sputter and shriek. Clutches his body, the Captain steps over it, toward the other, thrashing now against the wall and begun screaming. The two wailings twine and peel through the bowels of the ship, in its limits there trapped. In an empty room, the pixie is left to listen and weep.


	3. Chapter 3

A red disc from the horizon and the island is green again. A wooden lookout juts up from camp and patrols walk the treeline. Two drop into it, one named Vaya, a slim thing, once counted injun.

Slants of light cut the canopy through and a radius of stillness follows their way, void of birdsong and life. Insects dive underground and animals clear out, or else hide among branches. At the approach of their boots, flowers fold shut their petals, blooming in reverse as if sentient, as if privy to the men and to spurn their errand.

They reach a clearing, silent but for the ribboning of water on stone. Across the stream, a sapling, under which two boys wait, the shorter pelted grey after rabbits ensnared and slain.

"Throw down whatever ye've got," Pan warns them. They set rifle and bow in the dirt and walk forward, squinting now in the sunlight, palms shown in accord. Once across the stream, Pan draws a dagger and leaps at the injun, steel set to throat and falling down on him. "Let's see if his blood's yellow, too."

The grey boy puts a spear to the other man's chest, holding him there, yet the pirate speaks past him, an enormous man, a russet stubble his face. "Ye din't want to be durin that, lad."

"Bet." He is bent down, forehead pressed to the injun's and shoulders heaving with syrupy breath, poured forth to the man's face like nectar.

The white man says, "I bet it's a mistake."

"Yea? I'm all in."

The white man winces. "Hear us out first. We've come to ye, showed our hands and dropped our arms. What's done is done, there. It's just that."

Pan eases knife from neck and up from the injun. "Keep on yer back, snake, but I'll hear out yer mate." He is a tall boy, clad in green leafage as if plucked from the forest itself. Hair spun in tangles like vines and brushed with dew. Wet bangs onto a copper face set with waveblue eyes, flecked amber the color of morning.

"Simon," he says, "if he moves, if he opens his mouth, open him up." The boy Simon puts his spear to the injun and Pan turns on the other man. "What's yer name."

"It's Roderick."

Pan spits. "Go on, then."

"Aye. We're here fer to strike a deal with ye." He pauses. "The Captain's not right. He's banned us from the ship. Keeps only the fat one and the bell, howling in the dust and he's worsenin'. Ye've heard the cannons at night?"

"Get to yer point or I'll put you to mine."

"Some of the men are gone mutinous, and right for it. Forgotten us, 'e has. Left at camp without word for days, and there's them that look to take back the ship. Though we'll need you to do it."

Pan laughs. "Start talkin' sense."

"I'm talkin' gettin' yer girl back. Aid us with the ship and the bell's to you."

Pan plucks a leaf from limb and studies the green vein of it, bloodless lines spurting out from stem. "The bell's to me and your ship to you." He looks on Vaya, back-flat on the ground. "And then whhat fer the snake?"

Roderick answers. "We can't do it without him, lad. Honest we can't. We need their numbers."

Vaya meets Pan's gaze over the shoulder of the spear trained to his throat. Pan speaks to him. "You need the injuns, alright. What'll they need, then?"

"Dust," Vaya hisses through the spear-head.

The boy cries out and stabs into his shoulder, shallow in warning. The dark that red spills forth, it softens the soil it touches.

Pan says, "Ya see? Simon says shut and you better." He spits. "So. Ya set my girl on a hook and he snatched it away. Did ye think he'd throw her back to ya? Think I will?"

"They ask fer only a shake a day," says Roderick. "An' as far 's I can see it's a stretch better'n the deal 's ye've got."

"Only a shake, eh?" Pan is still watching Vaya.

He blinks back, bleeding.

"Shucks, he's red through, blood with his face. And I had 'im figured yellow." Pan turns back to Roderick. "No dust for the pirates?"

"Lad, I don't ask it. Only once it's done she set us loose from this place." He waves a hand, meaning the island and the waters round it. "That she show us the way out, we'll take it."

Pan's eyes soften. He looks to a clear cut of sky and the sun climbing. Among the tree-ring perches a single sparrow, a silent black spot amidst green, the only living thing to brave the men's presence. "Okay, pirate. Out with it, then."

"We can take the camp, but it's for nothing if Hook's still the run of the ship. He'd only throw cannonballs if we tried takin' it outright. He fires on all boats. But if we can get aboard, first, before the fight breaks out we can have it. It's only 'im and the fat one out there. Lend us a prisoner. A lead to you 's the only way he'll suffer a boat to the ship, the only way to lower 'is arms."

"And raise his hook over one of my boys."

"He'll not a chance. Soon as he lets us aboard we'll take it." Roderick speaks surely, set with what he believes must happen because it couldn't afford otherwise.

"Who 's we?"

"I, another, and one of yer own."

Pan looks to the leaves, green-bright and never to yellow. The only boy who knows it, flown through snow in places remembered, impossibly far. "Take me aboard."

Roderick shakes his head. "Ye haven't known him lately. He'd set his cannons ablaze soon as you was in sight. He's not right, I tell ye. We oughtn't chance you exciting 'im."

Pan considers the boy Simon, spear trained at his captive, and perhaps counts him capable. Perhaps he fears what's to befall him, were they to fail, what scorpions lay within the Hook. Perhaps he puts that away, or else considers only the bell.

"Two of my boys," he says. "Ye won't get one lonesome." He waves a hand and a rustling comes from the brambles flanking them round. Boys shake loose from leaf, a dozen in number, bearing spear and sling and silent the lot. "Who goes with Simon?"

Several boys step forward. Pan has them draw straws, let fate have its say, and the shortest goes to the boy hooded crimson. The fox sitting his head is fit down its fangs to his brow as if to swallow him whole. Pan spits.

He calls the two close and whispers their counsel. "Michael, if you want out, say so now."

The boy says nothing, courage for something yet.

"Alright, then. Simon, you're point as you're older," though age reckons nothing in Neverland and he knows it. "Take them straight away, and don't you let your eyes off the pirate, whatever his promise. Take the ship and I'll meet you after." He speaks hurriedly, betrays nothing of a gnawing within. "And keep Tink to yourselves. Don't let 'em touch her."

Now he looks to the others. "The rest with me. To take the camp." A roaring among the boys and he turns back to Roderick. "I don't want that injun aboard with my boys. He fights at camp with the rest of us."

Roderick nods and does not regard Vaya, who watches Pan, regains his footing. He steps to the stream and cleans his wound, blood splashing down cold with the water, eddying and thinning to nothing its way seaward. Roderick cuffs the boys and their chinking fades into the forest.

Pan eyes the sparrow above. It swings down and alights on his given finger, and he whispers to it in nothing of speech but a tongue forgotten, born with the island itself. The sparrow darts away and a boy claps his hand on Pan's shoulder.

"You get the hook, sure, but looks as like we'll have some hands fer ourselves."

Another crowing of boys. "More'n just hands," one says, and another, "The croc'll fatten up tonight." And another, "I'm makin' a new outfit of one of them fancy tattooed skins."

Pan turns from the boyish excitement, lust-like, and up to the blue jewel of sky, criss-crossed with branches. Sun sitting its zenith like some great golden crown keeping watch of them, and a breath, something goes out of him.

"How long till we sets out for camp?" A boy. "Can we paint our faces like the injuns?"

Pan squints. "Yer not going and me neither."

He sets off alone and, as the sun is swung from sky, reaches a bluff overlooking the sea. Red rags of cloud like ribs across the sky, underneath which sits the ship's black shape, leviathan-like on the sound. A dark dart falls and bounds and grows closer, forms wings, clutches a finger and tells of failure, of Hook below deck and peril to the boys. Pan flits the bird away and steps to the precipice. Water below, green in the shadow of the scarp and tossing and shivering and crested white like a sea of blades and he dives to it.


	4. Chapter 4

A sky drank black. Gunshots and screams sound out from camp. On deck, the Captain is fit with a glow in his pipe and a flash to his hook, the pixie there bound to its inner curve. As he waves about in delirium, sparks trace his swing and bells chime out though the fairy is gagged. The more dust he pulls, the darker that tremble the flames in his eyes and the heavier the smog he exhales, hanging low about the deck, concealing the injun in part, he in turn slumped down the mainsail, stomach flayed open. Intestine and liver spilled out over his legs, sprawled flat. The gulls that came to parcel him off dare not now for the boom of the cannon.

The cannonball deck bears a crude ball of iron, covered in gunpowder and toward which the Captain snaps down his hook, splashing her snow. In a calamity of noise and light the comet is cast shoreward, tailed with the incendiary dust and charged with it too in a shattering killing injun and pirate, mutinous and loyal. An ocherous cloud mushrooms up and falling in fumes to the battle on shore.

The Captain howls with laughter. "Can you see your mates, boy?"

He screams this to the boy Simon, hung again from his shackles, out from sight and over the waters, from the shaft of the cannon. The boy is faced to shore and watches through bleary eyes, and his face is touched with color for the fires there.

Shapes scramble in and out of firelight, and the arcs of arrows pulled downward from the darkness above like rain. Somewhere between shore and ship float two wooden oars, last pulled by Roderick, who either shared or escaped the fate of the dinghy.

"If only they could see you, boy," the Hook screams and pulls more through his pipe. "Their little lost rabbit, front and center." The intermittent report of gunfire.

Below the boy, a daggered hand reaches up from the water and stabs into the great hull. A figure climbs silently and touches the foot of the boy slung overhead.

The boy turns his head round. "Pan," he says woodenly, telling hope nor shame.

"I'm here, Simon," he whispers.

The boy turns back to the gunfire. "You're not ashore?"

"The boys neither. They're safe."

"But why aren't you there?" the boy asks again, perplexed his chief abandoned the chaos at camp. Perhaps perplexed still that the plan went awry and clinging yet to some rooted expectation taken for hope. "Why aren't you there fighting?"

Pan makes no answer. Perhaps he had known it would come to this. Knew the Hook and better the Bell, the dragons she must have awoken within him. Perhaps knew well enough to truly believe they could take the ship yet he sent them to it.

And another blast is flung from the cannon and it jolts Simon by his iron tether. "Did I get him, boy?" the Captain roars.

"Simon, listen to me," Pan whispers. "Where's Michael?"

The boy is shook into sobs and hangs his head.

Pan's face whitens and he climbs farther, just under the cannon. He peaks over the lip of the deck and sees the Captain rolling another ball to the cannon, Tinker Bell claw-bound. He ducks and is still, and whispers, under the wooden roll of the cannonball, "Simon. This next shot."

"Smee disappoints me," the Captain tells the bell. He lifts the sphere to its chamber. "But if he'd rather sulk below than enjoy the show, so be it. The brat won't spoil our fun, will he, dear?" He raises her overhead for another charge, and as the crash comes down, Pan kicks up, lifting the shaft from its hold. The unchecked recoil scatters cannon and Captain and boy across deck, spangling blue and green and pink grains of the pixie's to burn and blink out on the floor. What snows into Vaya's puddle hisses its end in thin streams of smoke that whirl upward and forsake shape altogether.

Regaining his senses, the Captain sees Pan, a silhouette against the fiery camp his back, perhaps counts him hallucinatory, the unforeseen shape of his opponent, but then the crow.

Pan crows out, clear and shrill, the unmistakable cry of war upon the Captain who knows it and reaches for his pistol, gone overboard. He wobbles to his feet, draws a saber, and Pan with his dagger halts a few paces out.

"I've come for you, cod." Simon limps over to Pan and stands his rear.

The Captain wheezes, stands straight. Black flames lick up from his eye-sockets, an expression of the dust yet coursing his veins. "Take back the rabbit. I've an ally yet."

Pan eyes the hostage glow of his hook, sees through it to the grief there wrought on her face. The only boy ever let to look on her plainly through the glare. "Go, Simon," he says, "and find Michael."

"Send him my best." The Captain says, and to Pan, "He's not well, you know."

Pan looks at the injun. The Captain grins. "He neither. Weak stomach, how is yours?"

"Put up yer sword and let's see."

"I hope it's a strong one." The Captain leers at the boy. "What you did to your friend down there. I wish you could have seen it, the way he sang for me. I might have clapped."

"Ye should've."

He raises the bell and shadows slant from his hook. "Still, the fox couldn't match your song, could it dear?"

"You set her loose."

"Catch her and she's yours." The dazzling sickle, the gagged pixie.

"I took a hand from you once. A finger is nothing."

The Captain laughs and works himself into a fit of it, howling and heaving up from his bowels an inky smog that circles him round and envelopes the deck in a blank shroud, cancelling out the stars above and the one his Hook.

The poisonous murk stings Pan's eyes shut and tentacles of it reach down his throat. The bells rush toward him and he steps from them blindly, barefoot. Ash sitting heavy his lungs and he coughs it out.

"Then run from me, elf, though your lungs betray you." The ringing bells and the heavy thrash of the saber, swung through the fog. "They've all betrayed you. Your injun, your girl, the pets that you sent me." He is screaming. "You've nothing at all, nothing left but the buzzards."

Pan squints, and can make out the dim gleam of the bell, kindled in effort to aid him, a light by which to fight back. He circles deftly round it, breath held, dagger ready, and his final step falls in a pool of blood, cold underfoot and splash squirming out the injun's betrayal in full.

The Captain turns round and slashes downward at Pan, finding his chest and putting him to the floor. The savage falls to the boy, the two illuminated by pixielight in the nebulous limbo. He snarls and raises his hook, burning over the boy.

"Go ahead, ye dirty sneak." The wound gushes across Pan's chest and he gasps for it and the smog, looks to the Bell. The anguish her face as she watches him back, though her eyes tell nothing of fear, only a grieving giving love. The understanding she grants whitens Pan's face, whiter still and unable to cry out as she brightens to a terminal blaze, flash beyond white yet he sees her through it, the winged shape tear from itself in a screaming detonation that rips Captain and ship apart.

Pirates and injuns alike watch from shore, and a few boys who fought against orders. A curious cloud has masked the ship, volcanic, and their fighting is put down without a victor. Silence. Then the burst, supernova at sea, a flare alike to the sun and washing the island day-green but an instant and the shockwave follows, pressing through the men and blowing as a gust through the branches and then the night still again but a far-off stir of cloud.

Roderick stands in the sand amid the fiery flickering of wreckage, corpses half-illuminated, looks out to sea and squinting spits. The ship tilted to horizon, a crack to its hull, just above which hangs a solitary star. A green light left behind. Not the bell. Suspended above deck and made radiant with her sacrifice is Pan, the only boy she ever favored.

Simon and Smee ascend to the deck, bearing between them the child-body, ruined and blue and quit of its agony. They grab hold of whatever's stationary for the grade of the ship, steadily steepening. A luminous Pan drops to them, takes up the body of Michael and the hand of Simon, does not consider Smee, and on a green whim lifts off to the island.

Smee is left on deck, solitary, does not weep. Does not move to retrieve his captain's ring, glinting red from the deck. Nor does he swim to shore, but sees the ship down, the only soul left it, his final obedience the cold churning of saltwater.

The boys bury their friend and look up at the tattered curtain of cloud, scraps of sky showing legs of constellations, swords of stars. And the shells of the moons sitting heavy through the veil, neither waxing nor waning.

The green glow has already begun to fade from Pan. It will not last the night through and he knows it, the last channel out from this place, a choice left him. He looks to Simon and considers the rest, lost, swallows.


	5. Chapter 5

Nightfall, Neverland. Constellations of swords and spiders turn a great wheel and two boys sit a bluff overlooking the sea. A flash from the ship, the Captain there feeding, pursued by its thunderclap.

The boy Michael speaks. "I don't want to deal with them either, but they could be our chance back to her."

Pan spits. "Let's us leave tomorrow alone, least till it's here."

They watch a bit more, the ship gone quiet. "Peter. Bet I could out-spit you."

Pan smiles wanly. "Ya think so?"

Michael grins and the two lean out to the precipice, belly-flat, and on the count of three spit out over it, gleaming in the moonlight and then lost in the dark and the wind.

The water's steady heave and Michael asks, "'Member the time you spit on Hook?" Pan nods and Michael recounts how the spit, burning green with Tink's spell, landed right in his eye and burned all the way down his cheek, how he shook his hook at them. "Just cussin' a storm," he adds laughing. "Don't he still have a scar from it?"

Pan doesn't answer, remembers everything. The boyish daring, trap-setting and clashes with pirates and crowing out dauntless, injun bonfires and the thrill of it all before she was taken. The weighted glow of her on his shoulder and how she danced for him nights alone, blooming pink on his naked chest and the lullaby of her bells, falling in sleep. "Can you remember when I brought you here?"

Michael shakes his head. "I was so young," and yet he has not aged since. Is still the boy of seven lured from the world with an infinite summer, a leafy island of treasure hunts, the hand of a fairy only ever given to Pan.

"When she's mine again I'll bring you back."

The boy watches Pan watch the cold crush of sea.

"You have a mother, Michael. Did you know that?"

"I don't want-"

"And none of the others have that but you." A breeze turns in, lifts and drops a wing. "Tomorrow, understand? And this place will forget itself for you."

The boy in the reckoning of a world he cannot remember. "I don't want to forget."

The slow stir of stars. "You already have."

The boy breathes the sea and the leaves.

A crash from the ship. A meteorite cast skyward in a vertical streak, the Captain firing upon the firmament and sending stars back like some deviant deity. The two watch the night through, war made upon the heavens and Pan making promises to a boy that he cannot keep.


End file.
